Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Playing MMORPGs my way, part 4. The end game mindset.

After TF2 last night I logged into Lotro and spotted one of the frequent invites for "Bounty Quests" in kin chat. Bounties are a form of daily quest that give lots of item experience and have become a regular routine for Lotro end gamers. I have been focusing on my low level LM alt so I had never done a bounty quest but I decided to sign up with Throg my level 60 to do them at least once before they get nerfed!

Doing the bounties turned out to be a pleasant half hour swift traveling around Middle Earth to dispatch a number of bosses. I began to think that joining the regular bounty runs could be an enjoyable and rewarding daily diversion. The item XP from bounties would be very useful for rapidly skilling up legendary weapons.

... but of course it wouldn't make sense to skill up any old crappy weapon so I should probably start grinding instances or farming gold in order to get my hands on a decent legendary weapon.

... and of course I would need to start farming relics in order to upgrade the weapon properly.

My mind was slipping into an end game mindset, visualising ways to repeat the same content over and over in order to achieve incremental improvements to my character.

Then I realised that my heart was sinking lower and lower the more I followed this line of thought. The thought of repeating the same content over and over in pursuit of ever smaller incremental improvements actually depresses me. The end game mindset depresses me.